I've been attending classes in photography at the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA for short) for a while, and am scheduled to finish with my Associates in Photography in December. It is really a fine program for a community college and I've had some great instructors, including a form National Geographic photo editor for 20 years, and a Chicago Tribune photojournalist, as well as the great instructors on staff at NOVA.

Each year they hold a juried student show, where active students can submit up to four framed pieces taken within the last twelve months. An outside judge comes and selects the pieces for the show, then also award the 'Jurors Award' to whichever they feel deserve it.

Last year I submitted four and one made the show. This year I submitted four and two made the show. It was the largest number of submissions they have ever had, with about 300 total photographs. 68 made it into the gallery. I did not win a Jurors Award, but feel honored just to make the cut into the main gallery with two pieces.

The judge was Chan Chao, a Burmese born photographer now residing in Washington DC who teaches at the Corcoran, Georgetown and George Mason Universities.

To the right is a very bad iPhone camera pic of my photos on the wall at the opening of the show last night. Both can be seen on my website.

The top image is from my personal series of images taken of my mother-in-law after her brain surgery at Johns Hopkins in December 2007, with Meghan walking beside her, on her way to physical therapy.

The lower image is from the Fairfax County Police Academy project I did in class last year (it barely made the time cut into the show, though they don't watch that too closely anyway).

These are two of my favorite images I have taken and to have them both selected feels great. The lower image also made it into a juried show in Denver, Colorado last year. There were over 4,000 submissions from four countries for that show.

The photo from Hopkins will hang in our home when it comes down. The police academy image I will be giving to a class mate of mine, Kelly, for her father who is a firing range instructor (and undercover officer) at the academy where the photo was taken. We met after I had completed the project.

Just short of a year ago I started my real estate photography business, Square Foot Photography, using the same templated look the rest of my websites has.

Over the last month I have been working on a new website for the business to help show more about the offerings and market the service better. Yesterday I launched the new website.

It allows much more room for text and imagery and is very adaptable to new pages and areas. I have my friend and co-worker Laura doing the copywriting and editing. Several pages have been completed, with more to go, but we decided it was in good enough shape to get out on the web to give a better presence.

I look forward to adding more to this site and keeping it up to date with new images as I take them, and hopefully drive more business to Square Foot in 2008!

www.squarefootphotography.com

I don't really like winter. The cold just gets annoying, putting coats on, taking coats off, bad weather causing drivers to drive even worse than usual. But the seasons mark time better than about anything else.

I was driving in to work this morning and my route takes me right past a public pool. I see it in the summer, the water glistening in the sun, and in the winter with its sagging cover on, one part always broken loose and a bit of the leftover water spilling over onto the top.

But I wasn't prepared this morning to see the pool cover pulled back, showing a half-full (half-empty?) pool of dirty water, waiting for its treatments to prepare it for a summer full of screaming children.

It just isn't time. Or at least it doesn't feel like it. We had one snow this winter. In general I don't mind that, but we should have more than one snow. My all-wheel-drive car I bought last summer feels deprived for not getting the exercise it deserves and craves.

The temperatures are creeping higher and we've already had a couple of 70-degree days. Before long we will be wishing for the temperature to drop to 70 degrees.

But until then I will keep wondering where winter went.


Photo: Oklahoma, February 2008, John H. Matthews

In an effort to catch up on things from the last two months I want to mention this film, which anyone who has talked to me in the last month is probably tired of hearing me talk about.

'Once' is an Irish film from 2006 that just got its play in the US late last year. It stars to relative unknowns, here at least. Glen Hansard is the lead singer of the Irish rock band The Frames and was in the 1991 film The Committments by Alan Parker. Marketa Irglova had not been in any film before this. It was directed by a former Frames drummer John Carney.

Shot in a realistic manner with a pair of handycams with a very small budget it is a wonderful film about two people in Dublin with enough in common to be more than friends.

The director claims that 60% of the film is music. And music is what the film is about. So much so that the Academy gave 'Falling Slowly' the Best Song Oscar last month. Never have I experienced a song that was so integral to the plot, advanced the plot, and set up the rest of the film than this one. Any other song winning the Oscar would have been a bigger upset than when Saving Private Ryan losing to Shakespeare in Love. And the song was almost disqualified from contention since the Academy had trouble dating the song, saying it was released before the film came out.

Rent, buy, or borrow 'Once'. Then buy the soundtrack. You won't be disappointed. And if you are, give it to someone else, they'll probably like it.

Well, it has been more than two months since I last posted, and the blog world simply has not been the same. My blog provider had some technical difficulties that prevented me from accessing my blog to do any updates, but all seems well now. So back to the random thoughts and comments.

Meghan's Dad turned 70 and to celebrate we threw a big surprise party for him down in Williamsburg. Joan was able to keep the secret for well over a month of planning and it was almost all canceled when she had to go into the hospital a week before the party. But it all worked out and he had his first surprise birthday party in 70 years.

There were well more than 30 people at the party from Richmond, New Jersey and New York, including Joe's best friend Tony.

Through much of December and into the New Year my wife's mother (she hates the name mother-in-law) was in the hospital at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. She had brain surgery to remove a pair of breast cancer tumors.

While she was there we spent much time up at the hospital including several visits while Joan was in physical and occupational therapy to relearn her basic skills such as talking and walking.

When we visited for her therapy for the first time, I asked her if she would mind if I took photographs and she gladly allowed me to.

Over three different visits to therapy I gathered many photographs of Joan working so hard to return to normalcy, to be able to go home and live her life with some similarity to how it was before.

She worked very hard. The therapists would give options on what to work on and she always chose the hardest. We saw her go up and down the gym staircase, walk the halls and eventually slightly move her right arm, which did not move for several weeks after the surgery.

She is home now and going to outpatient physical therapy. The therapists at Johns Hopkins were incredible and asked her to visit when she was back in Baltimore to see the surgeon for follow.

It's a long road ahead, but she's moving forward and making progress every day.

The entire collection of images can be seen at www.jhmatthews.com/hopkins.

On February 18, 2001, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for selling American secrets to Moscow. He plead guilty on 15 counts of espionage and had made more than $1.5 million dollars over 15 years of dealing with the Russians.

Before moving to the Supermax Federal Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, Hanssen lived in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife, a nice suburb of Washington, DC.

To pass secrets to his Soviet counterparts, he would place a wrapped, waterproof package under the base of a footbridge in Foxstone Park in Vienna, one of many Fairfax County Parks. A small pice of masking tape on the parks roadside sign would be turned vertically or horizontally by Hanssen or the Russians to denote a package was in place or had been picked up.

The film Breach with Chris Cooper as Robert Hanssen told the story of his double life and his arrest.

On the morning of his final delivery, he was rushed by FBI Agents and arrested on Creek Crossing Road after walking out of Foxstone Park. He said to the arresting agents "it took you guys long enough."

The park is about six miles from our house. We took a drive down to it over the holidays to walk the path and see the bridge. It was interesting and added to what we already knew about his arrogance, to see the path. Homes are sometimes only twenty feet from the path, and even on a cold December morning when we were there, people were out jogging and walking their dogs. He would walk down there in his suit on his way to or from work at the FBI offices in Washington, DC.

The hospital waiting room looked like every other hospital waiting room I had sat in before.

The walls were the least offensive shade of beige available while the patterns on the furniture alternated from solid to attrocious.

Small plastic displays on the end tables held brochures about any possible disease or ailment you could possibly ever get, the last thing you want to think about while sitting there.

The person sitting with their back to mine was coughing uncontrollably in his Member's Only jacket while the woman in the corner talked loudly on her cellphone describing everything wrong with her to some invisible listener. 

Shopping at Best Buy is a necessary evil. I don't know anyone who 'enjoys' going to Best Buy, certainly not any of their employees I have had to deal with in the past.

You can never find what you want, but always find something you don't need, and if you need help or have a technical question? Well, you might as well bang your head on the wall.

To make things worse, earlier this year (2007, that is) the Connecticut State Attorney's office began an investigation into the company for having a 'secret web site', a web site that looks exactly like the Best Buy web site, but is only available inside the stores. This secret web site generally has higher prices than the external web site.  After the investigation went on, Best Buy finally admitted to having the website.

But, they are still using it. We encountered it last night when we went in to do some shopping for an item Meghan had thoroughly researched online, including pricing. The price in the store was more than $18 higher than the website had it listed. It happened to me several months ago as well when I bought a big DVD gift set of Alfred Hitchcock films, it was $40 more in store than it was online.

The moral of this story is when you have to go to Best Buy to shop, shop informed. Check out what you want to buy on their web site from home, and PRINT IT OUT, so when you go in and it is more expensive, you can get a price adjustment.

Even better, research it on Amazon, and order with free shipping. All that being said, gotta run to Best Buy now to pick something up.

Baltimore, Maryland
December 2007